3. Complexity is a practical issue. I've encountered Stata programmers
of long experience who regard the expectation that help files are
written in SMCL as a reason to retire from the fray, so it's hardly
surprising that dialogs are a complication too far for many. In essence
you can't have dialogs without a programming structure to match.

I too rarely use dialogs; I just call up the help on a program. I
would love to have some sort of super-easy smcl editor, e.g. a "save
in smcl" addon to Word. For me at least, writing programs is kind of
fun, writing help files is extremely painful.